Thanks to the Mandriva Xfce volunteer development team, a community Xfce One edition of Mandriva Linux 2009 is now available for download from all official Mandriva mirrors. A list of download locations can be found on the Wiki page. This release gives you all the benefits of Mandriva Linux 2009 along with a fast and stable Xfce desktop.

We mostly actually recommend LXDE (as mentioned in later comments) on netbooks. 'urpmi task-lxde' will install it on any Mandriva 2009 system. We did have a plan to do a special 'netbook edition' USB image based on LXDE, but I'm not sure we're going to have the time to get that done - it still may happen, though.

to make various bootable USB images (overwriting my one USB stick each time) in order to trial various .iso LiveCDs.

Unetbootin works with Ubuntu variants.

I have just downloaded the .iso image of Mandriva One XFCE which is the topic of this thread, and ran Unetbootin with that .iso image to create an new bootable USB image. With Mandriva One 2009, however, it starts to boot but doesn't make it all the way. It stops with an error stating:

"Cannot run '/etc/init.d/rcS' : no such file or directory"

I'm fairly sure that this means that having loaded the kernel, Mandriva One is looking for the "rest of itself" on a CDROM drive which doesn't exist on the netbook.

Is there any way netbook owners can create a working bootable USB from a Mandriva One .iso LiveCD image?

Would it be possible to simply create a symbolic link named "cdrom" pointing to the correct place on the USB stick to work around this problem?

Netbooks are likely to be a significant part of Mandriva's target audience. It would be a shame to miss out because people couldn't get it booted.